What ethical obligations do researchers have to protect the privacy of subjects engaging in activities in “public” Internet spaces? (Buchanan and Zimmer, 2012).

The above question became relevant when, in 2015, a colleague and I conducted research into student-led Facebook groups (Coughlan and Perryman, 2015). At the time, little had been written about the ethics of social media-based educational research. We therefore devised our own ethics strategy and then wrote an article called A murky business: the ethics of conducting educational research in Facebook groups (Perryman and Coughlan, n.d.). Our article ends by quoting Zimmer (2010), identifying an issue warranting further attention:

Future researchers must gain a better understanding of the contextual nature of privacy in these spheres… recognizing that just because personal information is made available in some fashion on a social network, does not mean it is fair game for capture and release to all. (Zimmer, 2010, cited in Perryman and Coughlan, 2015)

As an online educator, you may wish to research your own students’ online practices, or those of other educators and students, in public or private settings. Researching in public online spaces may appear a particularly easy win, with openly accessible data available in abundance, for example in Facebook groups, MOOCs, social media, virtual worlds and online forums. Yet the ethical implications are tricky to navigate.

One of the main challenges of collecting digital data or doing research and scholarship in a digital space is the uncertainty about what is public, private or semi-private and whether researchers and scholars are entitled to use data available in a public space, such as a public Facebook group. These questions are critical when privacy and informed consent are considered. Always check the terms and conditions of the digital space you are using for your study and whether users are entitled to privacy and therefore would need to give informed consent for their data being used for research.

People who have shared data openly may not be aware of the metadata (information about the data – for example, where a photo has been taken) that they have shared with it, or the ways in which it can be combined with other data sets. For example, the ‘I Know Where Your Cat Lives’ project run by Florida State University locates a sample of 15 million public images of cats on a world map by the latitude and longitude coordinates embedded in their metadata. The pictures are openly available on sites such as Flickr and Instagram, and the project highlights how much information we may share unwittingly. More alarmingly, the ‘Please Rob Me’ project raised awareness of the potential for burglars to connect openly shared information about homes, holidays and location ‘check-ins’ to identify when houses would almost certainly be empty.

In the above video, I talk with philosopher and researcher Robert Farrow about how researchers might navigate the murky distinction between public and private domains online.© Video: The Open University